Getting Started with Linux Stacks

In this walkthrough, you will learn how to use AWS OpsWorks Stacks to create a Node.js
application
environment. When you are done, you will have an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon
EC2) instance running Chef 12, a
Node.js HTTP server, and a web app that you can use to interact with Twitter and leave
comments
on a web page.

Chef is a third-party framework for configuring and maintaining servers, such as EC2
instances, and how apps are deployed and maintained on those servers. If you aren't
familiar
with Chef, after completing this walkthrough, we recommend that you learn more about
Chef so
that you can take full advantage of all that AWS OpsWorks Stacks has to offer. (For
more information,
see the Learn Chef website.)

AWS OpsWorks Stacks supports four Linux distributions: Amazon Linux, Ubuntu Server,
CentOS, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
For this walkthrough, we use Ubuntu Server. AWS OpsWorks Stacks also works with Windows
Server. Although we
have an equivalent walkthrough for Windows Server stacks, we recommend that you complete
this
walkthrough first to learn basic concepts about AWS OpsWorks Stacks and Chef that
are not repeated there.
After you complete this walkthrough, see the Getting Started: Windows walkthrough.